The Federal Railroad Administration sponsored Kansas State University (K-State) in research to improve the design and performance of crossties. K-State used a Creaform HandySCAN 700 3D hand-held scanner to scan the surface of crossties removed from service to a spatial resolution of about 1 mm, resulting in a 3D solid body CAD model of each tie. They developed a high-speed algorithm to process the detailed cross-section geometrical parameters to an axial resolution of 0.5 inch. To assess and verify the accuracy of the 3D scanning procedure, the scanned results were compared to known 3D CAD model geometry. The results reveal a show good match between the CAD model cross-section dimensions and the scanned results. This new measurement technique is an efficient method to collect the geometric parameters of a tie that influence pre-stress transfer length, including the shape factor.